I arrived in Pune around 3AM Friday together with Harish Pilllay (harish), Eugene Teo (eugeneteo) and Heherson Pagcaliwagan (azneita) after a long 5 hours flight from Kuala Lumpur + 6 hours taxi from Mumbai - because the taxi driver were lost several times. Had a short sleep and the day started at around 7AM as we need to catch the bus to the FUDCon venue, which was at College Of Engineering Pune.

At COEP, it was great to be able to finally attach faces to those nicks and names which I've known for quite some time in IRC and mailing lists. We also manage to meet up with Jared Smith, the Fedora Project Leader, and it was great sharing ideas and chatting about Fedora with him.

The way FUDCon Pune was ran - especially the first and second day - reminds me a lot of FOSS.My - the general FOSS conference we once had for 2 times, which no longer around to give way for more specialized conferences. The format, the audience, gave me a lot of dejavu throughout the day, with one difference - FUDCon had more than 40 volunteers, while FOSS.My had very few. The volunteers self organized very well and they made the event ran very successfully.

On the first day I went to the opening keynote by Jared, hanged around in the lounge, helped out Heherson's Web of Trust session, and managed a lightning talk session at the end of the day. On the second day, I mostly in the auditorium listening to the talks scheduled there. One that caught my interest was the virt talks as I was wondering on the roadmap of LXC support. During the hackathon day, I was mainly fooling around with creating LXContainers using libvirtd, and writing scripts to simplify the creation process.

The day after FUDCon, after others have left to home, I hanged around in Red Hat Pune's office with Jared, Heherson, Joerg, Robert and the rest of the FUDCon India team. Jared, Heherson, Joerg and Robert left to Mumbai later in the afternoon to catch the flight, while I remained for a day more as my flight with AirAsia was on the next day, Tuesday, 21:55 hrs.

Left Pune around 12:30 hrs Tuesday, and arrived in Mumbai around 17:00 hrs. After 4 hours waiting, boarded the flight and took off from India. Arrived in KLIA-LCCT around 5:30 hrs GMT+8, took breakfast at McDonalds, and after switching several busses, arrived home around 10:30.

Some random notes from the event for those who want to run a FUDCon later.

Running FUDCon in normal conference format is ok , if the crowds are mainly non-contributors.

Mixing format is better - cater for both non-contributors and contributors

A lot of volunteers to help out with work is GoodThing(tm). Get enough numbers so that they can switch places and listen to talks too. Don't worry about not having enough work to distribute to volunteers, as less work means less stress, and easier to handle emergency cases.

Vegetarian food +1, less worry on providing food to people with religious restrictions.

Produce extra swags - cheaper to produce and we can distribute extras to ambassadors to bring back to their country.

While FUDPub in FUDCon Pune is really like its inside a pub (party with loud musics like the HiTB Post Conference Party), Jared mentioned that FUDPubs can also be done in a form of hanging out in restaurants, bowling, etc - the key point is - a social event for contributors to hang around.

Use coupons to manage food for sponsored attendees, volunteers, and crews.

I broke my N900 a few days before going to India, so no photos from me, but you can view photos uploaded by other FUDCon attendees in flickr tag #fudconin11